


The King's Man

by selahexanimo



Category: The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-01
Updated: 2016-01-01
Packaged: 2018-05-09 07:07:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5530439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/selahexanimo/pseuds/selahexanimo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For seven years, Sheik has waited for the Hero of Time to awaken. But he is young and lonely, and his patience is limited. So when Ganondorf issues a command that puts the Lon Lon Ranch in jeopardy, and Malon asks for help, Sheik accepts a new undertaking: to restore order to the ranch.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The King's Man

**Author's Note:**

  * For [morna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/morna/gifts).



> Because no one should have to live in a small ship hell.

In the seventh year of his reign, King Ganondorf sends Sheik to collect the white-maned mare from the Lon Lon Ranch — and to collect the girl who serves there as farmhand, as well.

The order is unanticipated — by Shiek, by the ranchmaster, by the girl herself. But Sheik does not question it. He is the king's man, carrying out Ganondorf's orders as Impa and the princess have commanded him to do until the hero awakes. It is a long ride to the ranch, through the dusky light of midday. For seven years, the sun has slept behind a pall of rainless clouds, Ganondorf Dragmire's curse upon the land.

The ranch is still when Sheik arrives, a wasteland of deserted outbuildings and fences lopsided and rusted. The stone wall that surrounds the property is crumbling; Sheik nearly takes it for a natural formation. Skulltula web wafts like lace in the eaves of the house, and the nearby coop is little more than kindling. Cuccos peck in its shadow.

He thinks the ranch is abandoned, until he spots the ranchmaster striding toward him in a suit of gold-and-purple cloth, waving.

The ranchmaster shouts for the farmgirl to, "get the horse." Sheik catches sight of her in the barn, skittering back, straw in her hair and muck on her face. She returns with the mare on a rope. When the ranchmaster tries to wrench the rope from her hands, Sheik barks, "Leave her. She comes with me."

The ranchmaster gapes. "You can't take her. I need someone to work this place, I've no one _else_."

"Then you must take the matter up with your king, sir."

The girl balks, when Sheik offers her a hand. "I can't leave the horses alone with Ingo," she says, in a voice sore and rasping, with arms clenched against her chest. "He doesn't know how to care for them, sir. He'll treat them wrong."

Ingo growls, "She doesn't know what she's saying." He steps toward her. The girl flinches back.

"Step aside," says Sheik, and when the ranchmaster does not move, adds, "Shall I show you how?"

Ingo obeys, with a low, sullen look.

"The king himself has asked for you." Sheik turns to the girl, hand still extended. "You must come with me, or it will go worse for you." Her face flickers, and he knows she understands his meaning — for her _and_ for the ranch. He tries to soften the blow. "But I promise that I will find someone to look after this ranch in your stead."

"Can you swear it?" she says, but her shoulders have slumped in surrender.

"I can, and I do."

She grasps his hand. "You might even mean it."

Her disbelief stings. But Sheik cannot help wondering what he looks like to her, seated upon his gray-flecked charger, expressionless behind the heavy scarf that swathes the lower half of his face, King Ganondorf's emblem stitched into his cloak. Sheik knows he is different from the moblins and stalfos and lizafols who roam Hyrule Field and patrol the villages, frightening good folk, pillaging homes and barns, slaughtering when they are bored. (Knows this as he knows the shape of the harp between his hands — though his knowledge of both these things grows thinner everyday.) But this girl does not know he is different. She could not tell him from a moblin, a stalfos, a lizafols, not in the way that matters most.

For he serves the king just as they do.

oOo

Sheik rides slowly, to keep from jarring her, and hopes that the motion will rock her to sleep — she looks as if she needs it. But she does not sleep, and hold herself as far away from him as she can, her body stiff and tense. He knows she must be a better horsewoman than this. The ranch, and all the horses, belonged to her and her father, once.

He feels her turning, now and then, to watch the white-maned mare. The mare refuses to be led. Sheik worries she will collide with them or cause his charger to rear. He clings grimly to the reins, wishing he had not bothered with a horse. He is Sheikah; he prefers his own two legs.

"I should ride her," the girl says, at last. "She won't calm down, otherwise."

Sheik considers her proposal. "I won't run," the girl adds with a sigh.

She dismounts and goes to the mare, then begins to hum. Sheik only catches hints, not enough to make sense of her song, but its effect upon the horse is instantaneous. The mare stops her restless cantering and lowers her head. The girl strokes her and presses her face to the mare's forelock. Sheik looks away, to give them time.

They are still two leagues away from the castle when dusk falls. Sheik dismounts and offers the girl a hand, but she only watches him until he gives up and turns to tether his horse.

"We'll sleep beside the path," he says. "The monsters don't come near it."

"They don't know their own?" she asks, without rancor. Her tone is blank.

Sheik curls his fingers into his palm and digs, until the bandages start to tear.

"Could you build a fire?" he asks, keeping his voice measured. The girl obliges. She moves slowly, bending down in the dry grass, tearing up clumps for fuel, filling her skirt with fungus and scat. "Please don't go far," Sheik says. "The stalchildren fear the path, but they are hungry, too."

She glances back at him, then continues on. He wonders if it is an act of penance, for abandoning the ranch and listening to him — wandering off to fill her skirt, too tired to think of anything but the task at hand, quietly hoping a stalchild will finish her off.

On his worst days — that have begun to stretch into weeks and months, long spells when he is empty of feeling, and the thought of his task, and Impa, the princess, and the hero, do nothing for him — Sheik performs his own penance. He slips from the castle on moonless nights, catches moblins off guard beside their campfires in ones and twos. He leaves no prints, makes no sound, and his knives sink into the soft flesh of their throats, snagging as he carves. They die thrashing, their mouths thick with blood, and afterward Sheik wrenches out their teeth, chops off ears, extremities, opens their severed throats until only the keenest eye could detect the Sheikah art in the initial cuts. He tells himself he does this for the pillaged farms, the people slain.

But he does it because he is waiting for the day when his Sheikah art fails him, and he does not catch the moblins unawares. Death by their knives and truncheons is preferable to the endless, empty months of waiting, when he might as well be dead anyway.

The girl comes back. Sheik walks in a circle about their camp muttering spells, while she digs the firepit. But the time she has laid it, he has finished their protections. He crouches across from her and whispers a word at the pit. Fire sparks in the grass.

"Can anything get in?" She looks to the horses as she says this, seeming unmoved by the sudden appearance of the flames. "Are we safe?"

"Safe enough." He reaches into his saddlebag and pulls out the bread and jerky. He offers her some. She considers the offering for a long moment, then takes it.

"What's you're name?" he asks. "He cannot keep calling her _the girl_ in his head.

"Malon."

She does not ask for his, but he puts this down to the fact that she has just crammed her mouth with bread. He tells it to her anyway — his real one, rather than the assumed one he gave the king, for it still rankles that she might think of him as _the king's man_ , and by the king's name.

She looks surprised. "You're Sheikah?" she asks, and he regrets the confidence, knee-jerk, seven years of secrecy flooding back to amend his lapse.

"The Sheikah are all dead." He holds her gaze. "But my mother was zealot." It is a common falsehood; there are women enough in Hyrule naming their children for the people they hope those children will become — naming them, in the case of _Sheik_ , in hopes they will serve royal family of Hyrule.

Back, of course, when such an honor still existed.

Malon does not pursue the question. "What does the king want with me?" she asks, when she has swallowed the rest of her bread.

"I don't know."

"And with Epona? When he has a fine beast all of his own already?"

The mare has grown restless again, as if hearing and understanding her name; she paws and huffs and the firelight reddens her creamy mane and forelock. "He wants her because she is young and strong and beautiful," he says. "His own mare has served him well, but she is very old."

He despises the softness of his own words, their honesty. He does not mean to speak of the king, or anything the king owns, in this way. Understanding only makes his task harder in the end. (This task that keeps his honest, even with a falsehood stitched above his heart and tripping off his tongue. He looks across the firepit at Malon, cross-legged and hunched with ribbons of hair spilling across her face and her jaw working, and he wishes he could tell her what he is doing, why he is here, so she will know he is different from the moblins, the stalfos, from Ingo and the king, so she will understand that he is not lying when he made his promise about the ranch. But in seven years, he has told no one of his purpose, by command of Impa and the princess. He will not start now. His name is exposure enough.)

Malon sleeps wrapped in her cloak, her back to the fire, while Sheik keeps watch. His eyes return to her, again and again. Her braid is long and deeply red, the end fraying and unraveling from its cord. Her breath whistles and her face is pinched. He pulls his harp from his saddlebag and sits with it for a long while, fingering the wire too lightly for sound. He has not played in months.

But when Malon tosses again and whimpers, he plucks out a short song, some Kakariko lay about a girl who goes to fetch water and sees a ghost lamp in the Field. She follows its playful flicker down into a fairy's grotto and lives out the rest of her years among its mazy corridors, never to be seen aboveground again. Sheik plays it through once, twice, then follows it with the handful of notes he caught from her humming, earlier that day. Malon's face slackens, and she huddles deeper into her cloak, body loose and finally still.

He plays until the sky pinks with dawn.

oOo

Sheik presents Malon and Epona to the king, but the king is occupied, and waves them away. He is sunk deep into the throne, his face heavy with thought, and when Sheik turns to leave, the king calls, "You have not brought me word of the princess or her supporters in some time, boy."

Sheik pauses. "I can find no evidence of them, Sire," he says, turning back. "The princess is long gone, and we have rooted out any who would support her."

"And yet," Ganondorf says, "I receive report upon report of moblin patrols turning up dead."

Sheik holds himself very still. "They are moblins, Sire. They fight among themselves."

"They do." Ganondorf shifts, his armor creaking. "But my people know better than to report such things to me. You see, boy, there is a pattern in these incidents."

Sheik counts his breaths as the king speaks — in-two-three-four-five, hold-two-three-four-five, out-two-three-four-five. "I see," he says. "Perhaps the people are taking vengeance for their burned crops. The families they have lost in attacks."

"Peasants who are unusually good with the knife, yes."

Out-two-three-four-five. "I do not doubt they are, Sire. Theirs is a hard life."

Ganondorf considers him. "Look into this and report back to me within a fortnight."

"As you command. What shall I do with the horse and the girl, Sire?"

"Show her the stable. There is room for both her and the horse."

"But might she not be more comfortable—"

Ganondorf tilts his head, and Sheik subsides.

"As Your Lordship commands." He bows and retreats, and does not once turn his back on the king.

oOo

Over the next two weeks, Sheik scouts for the moblin killer. He keeps his knives sheathed, for the most part, and looks away from the pillaged crops, the razed cottages. But when there are survivors still in evidence, he speaks to them.

"There is a ranch in need of farmhands," he tells them. "You may consider it your place of refuge until you have settled on some better spot to rebuild your lives."

Even as he speaks, he watches their eyes flit to the king's emblem upon his cloak. Some turn away. Other spit. One woman screams at him, "You canker _dog_ , you _bastert_ , my children are dead because of your king, and everything _lost_." She rakes his face with her nails, before her sister hauls back. Sheik supposes he deserves this. Where death is preferable to waiting, curses are preferable to death.

But others follow his lead, bewildered by their loss and open to suggestion. He guides them, straggling across the Field with what they have salvaged of their lives, and sees to it that they settle in.

But before he does this — before he sends anyone — Sheik visits the ranch alone. The night is moonless, and the lock upon the house easily broken. He steals up the stairs, hands on his knives.

The ranchmaster sleeps in a narrow bed, like the monks who once tended the Temple of Time. Sheik turns up the oil lamp and stands over him with his back to the light, until Ingo groans and cracks open his eyes.

He catches sight of Sheik and shouts, rolling upright and flinging himself back against the wall. "Who—?" he begins, and Sheik cuts in, "You king has another order for you."

Ingo sucks in his breath. "You've taken the girl and my best horse," he cries. "There's nothing more I can give you."

"I said your _king_ ," Sheik grits out, "has another order.

"You will have your farmhands. There are people who have lost their livelihood in moblin raids, and the king has ordered that they come here to work the land and care for the livestock. You will oversee them and treat them well. I will oversee _you_ , and make sure that you do it."

"I own this ranch." Ingo spits the words. "The king has given it to me alone."

"Did, until he received my report. You treated the mare you promised him well enough, but you have run this ranch into the ground. He has questioned the girl, and had her report as well. He is displeased. He trusted you."

Ingo's fists twist in the sheet. "She's lying, the wench is _lying_."

"And am I lying too?"

Ingo's face twists. "You think because you serve His Lordship that you can stand over a man and threaten him in his own bed."

The truth of his words rankle. But Sheik has not come here for himself.

"Are you not listening, ranchmaster? The king has given you another chance to prove your worth."

He watches Ingo, and Ingo watches him, until at last, the ranchmaster slumps back and looks away.

"Well then," he mutters. "When are they coming?"

"They will not come all at once." Sheik steps back. "They will come in ones and twos, and I will come with them, to make sure they settle in and that you do your job."

"And how will I feed them? And clothe and house them?"

"You are master here," says Sheik. "And the king ensures you are well provided for. You will find a way."

oOo

His fortnight up, Sheik returns to the king and gives his report. "There have been no incidents," he says, "and accounts of the slain moblin patrols vary. The culprits may be vigilantes or moblin hunters, according to the speculation. And there is only speculation, for I could find no sign of them."

"Are you saying I am mistaken?"

"Only that is seems whoever is killing the moblins had gone into hiding. Perhaps knowing that you are searching for them, Sire, is enough to keep them at day."

"I did not ask you to search for the culprit because I am concerned with the moblins," Ganondorf says. "The culprit may slay another hundred if it means that you discover who they are and what these deaths mean."

"Will You Lordship permit me to speak? I do not think this is a sign of an uprising, or that the princess still lives. The land is riddled with violence. What is a little more?" The words taste sour in his mouth.

"I sent you out to search for the killer because I thought you were competent," says Ganondorf, in a thoughtful tone. "But it has been two weeks, and you have brought me nothing worth hearing. Seven years, and you still cannot find the princess."

"Because the princess is most likely dead, Sire."

"If she is dead, then I want a body. Where is her body?"

Sheik does not answer. They have been over this, time and time again.

"Well?"

"I have displeased you. If Your Lordship desires, I will leave your service."

"You have displeased me," says Ganondorf. "But I have use for you yet."

He gestures in dismissal. Sheik bows his way from the room.

And that night, he goes to the Temple of Time and sits among the rafters, watching the closed door behind the altar, cursing the hero who sleeps behind it and the goddesses who have damned him to this endless slumber.

"It has been seven years," he breathes. "You must wake up."

oOo

He finds Malon working in the stables the next day. It is the first time he has sought her out since bringing her to the castle. She wears the same clothes, the same braid. But she looks rested and fuller, her paper skin filled out. She is turning the straw with a pitchfork, humming.

She sees his shadow and turns to face him, falling silent. He thinks how uncanny it is to see her looking so much improved here in Ganondorf's castle.

"Well?" she says. "What news of the ranch?"

"The horses are well," he says, "and the cows and cuccos. I have visited them as often as I could. The ranchma—Ingo, he has settled into his duties."

"And what are those?"

"He is to put the ranch in order, under my supervision, with the help of the farmhands I sent him. They have lost their own farms to moblins and need the work and shelter while they get back on their feet. They know their business."

Malon looks away, toying with the handle of her pitchfork. Sheik peers at her shadowed profile — and feels a jolt of relief to see that she is smiling, just a bit.

"That sounds like just the arrangement," she says, then looks at him full on. "Thank you, Mr. Sheik."

"Just Sheik."

"Are we to be friends, then?" He begins to protest, but she gives him a wan smile. "I'm only making fun. Call me just Malon."

"If you would like."

"I would, yeah."

They stand for a long minute, Malon picking splinters from the pitchfork, Sheik pushing a toe through the dirt. They speak at the same time.

"I don't want to keep you—"

"So I've found out why the king asked—"

They look at each other in shock. "My apologies," says Sheik. "You know why the king asked for you?"

Malon shrugs, rueful. "For Epona's sake. And for his mare, as well, though she doesn't like me. She gave me this." She lifts her skirt, enough for him to see a thick bandage on her calf.

Sheik winces. "I'm sorry. May I—may I see it?"

"It's healing."

"I could help it along."

She considers him, remembering, perhaps, their first night on the road, Sheik walking about their camp murmuring spells of protection. "If you'd like," she says. "It's gruesome."

He thinks of the twist of his blade in moblin flesh, blood burbling beneath his hands, his clothes black with gore. "I'll live."

The wound is well-tended and not so gruesome. Sheik prods her leg, looks for signs of infection, a Sheikah talent he has never been especially good at. Malon leans against the pitchfork for balance and watches the top of his head. She shudders, whenever he touches her, and so he speaks to distract her.

"So you are to serve as groom."

"I suppose." She shifts a little. "Groom to the man as gave away my livelihood."

His hands trace the wound, careful not to touch. "You would not be the first."

"I never thought to end up here." Her voice is as quiet as the falling dusk, and Sheik must strain to hear her. "I never thought to lose my da, or the ranch, just sit by and watch it all go. I suppose that's why I'm here. You get into the habit of doing nothing and then it's too late to start, you're too far gone." She jumps, when Sheik's fingers brush her. "Is that how you ended up here?"

"Yes," he says. He had never questioned Impa or the princess, only done exactly what they had said, and when he thinks of these seven years, spent motionless and waiting, he feels the emptiness yawning inside of him, spreading like a cancer. His tongue trips over the spell he has begun to speak, to help with the scarring, and with a frustrated hiss, he begins again. He has ceased to be anything but pitiable — wanting to do good, and doing nothing in the end.

"There," he says, after a moment, rising. "It was halfway healed on its own, but it's most of the way, now."

Malon cranes her neck to examine her leg, and when she lifts her head again, her eyes a little brighter.

"You know," she says, "I think you're the first good person I've met in years."

He moves as if to touch her shoulder, then drops his hand. She catches it in her own and squeezes. Her palm is calloused, her fingers short and blunt. He thinks it is the most beautiful hand he has ever seen. He feels a sudden urge to kiss the heel of it, to slide his lips down to the bones of her wrist. He cannot remember the last time he ever felt such an urge, if he ever has.

He says, instead, "You are the only good person I have ever met."

She lets go of his hand. "You might even mean it," she says, with something like wonder.

oOo

Over the next few months, Ganondorf makes no particular demands on Sheik's service, and so Sheik goes about his usual work — gathering reports and pretending to seek the princess and any dissenters. He soon puts an end to the search for the moblin killer: a group of bandits begin attacking villages, and Sheik requests a force to subdue them.

"These bandits were your moblin killers, Sire," he says, when he makes his report. "Their leader confessed, before he died of his wounds, and their knives fit the pattern you noted in the killings. They turned to villages when they'd had their vengeance, or sport, or whatever it was."

Ganondorf considers him for a moment. "I see. You are dismissed."

Sheik visits the ranch, too, often and randomly enough that Ingo does not have time to be tyrannical. The ranchmaster shrinks from his approach and gives reports of the ranch's progress in a sullen voice. But the refugees corroborate his accounts. They have begun to settle in and undo the damage wrought by neglect: mending fences and rotted outbuildings, clearing the fields. They tend to the animals and speak of planting, banding together to care for their sick and build shelters for themselves and the people who come after them. It is unlike anything Sheik has ever seen since Ganondorf seized Hyrule and cast his spells of vengeance (darkness and drought upon this fertile earth and the people who once spurned him). It is a fragile birth, sproutlike. Sheik fears to breathe, lest it is an illusion.

But he finds himself drawn to the ranch, this slow rebirth, this idea that perhaps seven years have not blighted the land and its people beyond hope.

Once, while Sheik is helping to clear a Skulltula nest, it begins to rain, a white roar that beats the dry earth. No one takes cover. They break off work to lift their faces and kick off their shoes to feel the dust turn to mud. Sheik has never felt rain like this in seven years. He pulls down his scarf, to taste each drop so sweet and clean, to feel its tattoo on his face.

The sunlight, too, seems brighter. Sometimes Sheik wonders if Ganondorf's curse is breaking. But he understand it cannot. Only the hero's return could break the king's spells.

"The ranch is becoming what is was," Sheik says to Malon — for he makes regular reports to her, as well, when they share a midday meal.

Her face crumples for an instant. She catches herself and tries to smile, but she is struggling, and her fingers are nervous, picking apart her bread and scattering it in the straw. "I'm glad of it," she says, "but I will be even gladder to know when Da and I can go back."

She waits, but Sheik has nothing to tell her.

"Could I at least meet with the king and plead my own case?" Her voice is frail. "I only want one day. And Epona. To come with me, I mean, to see how the ranch is coming along."

"I will speak with him," Sheik says.

But a week passes, and for all his requests and insistence that he must give his reports, the king does not grant him an audience.

He finds Malon crying, one day, in one of the stalls. She jumps, when he crouches before her, and turns her face from him with a sob.

"I shouldn't," she says, "I shouldn't, I know, but _oh_ , Sheik, I just — I just want to see it _once_ , the ranch, and _Da_ —"

He pulls her against him and lets her weep into his cloak, her face buried against the emblem of the king.

"Meet me here at the first strike of the clock," he says, against her hair. "I will take you to your ranch."

Malon pulls back, eyes wild with hope. "The king has given his permission?"

"No. He will not grant me an audience; I suspect he is occupied. He will not miss either of us."

He watches the shifts of her expression, caution and fear warring with need.

"You can't know that," she says.

"No, I can't."

She grips his upper arm. "Then let me take the blame, if the king is angry. Tell him I made you do it, tell him—"

Sheik chops a hand. "Do not ask me that. You know I won't. Besides. There is a change he will be merciful, or that he will not care."

Whatever Ganondorf Dragmire feels, if he ever learns Sheik has taken his groom back to her ranch, Sheik hopes it will leave the both of them intact.

oOo

They ride upon one horse, the gray-flecked charger, that Malon has saddled and waiting by the time the clocks strike one. Malon does not ask about bringing Epona. They both know it is better if she does not come.

Riding is a different experience, this time. Malon loops her arms around his waist and settles her hips against his. Her body is solid against his back, and he tilts his head, just a bit, to better feel her breath against his neck. Her chin burrows into his shoulder, the pressure of it sharp, leaving behind a good sort of pain.

Sheik urges the charger to a trot through the ruins of Castle Town. The shadows of collapsed buildings and trash-filled alleyways shift at the corners of his eyes, and there are moans, long and thin, that could be mistaken for wind. Sheik whispers a spell of concealment, not as powerful as one of protection but good enough. Malon's arms tighten until he feels an ache in his ribs. "There are redeads," he murmurs. "But they will not harm us."

"Have you spoken your protecting spells?" she breathes

"A few. But I am saving most of those for Hyrule Field."

"Maybe we should stay. You mustn't wear yourself out." Malon pauses, then explains. "A boy told me, once, about magic. He said you can only use it for so long before it sucks the strength from you. I don't want that to happen, Sheik. You mustn't hurt yourself for me."

"I've brought a replenishing potion," Sheik says. "And I'm strong."

"Don't say that if it's not true. Can you swear that it is?"

He touches her hand. "I can, and I do."

"All right," she says, and burrowing his face against his back, breathes out.

oOo

The road and the moonless night serve their purpose, and Sheik and Malon ride into the ranch a little before the sun.

Malon dismounts and gazes about as if she is the girl in the Kakariko song, spirited by a ghost lamp into the fairy's grottos. Sheik wishes he could see the ranch with fresh eyes, as she does. He has watched the refugees revive it from the beginning, but Malon has had nothing but his reports to feed her own imagination.

She starts walking, and Sheik follows. The cuckoos are cackling, angry to be locked up. Two girls straggle from a line of shanties, carrying buckets of feed and calling for the cuckoos to hush. They freeze when they see Sheik and Malon.

"Hello," says Malon, and holds out her hand. "Do you mind if I help?"

The girls look at one another, and the youngest hands her bucket over. Malon looks at Sheik, eyes bright and lips pressed together. She opens them just long enough to mouth _thank you_.

By the time the cuckoos are out, the sky is pale with dawn, the ranch awake. People nod to Sheik, familiar enough with the sight of him that they keep their greetings brief. They take Malon for a refugee. She walks about with her hands clenched in her skirt; she flits from person to person, helping here with one chore, there with another. When the breakfast is finished cooking, she and Sheik sit on one end of the long table. Sheik listens to the conversation, Malon chattering with everyone within reach of her voice. He is pleased that she is finally so happy. But he wishes, too, they could sit by themselves — he misses the privacy of their midday meals back at the castle, and he does not like eating in front of so many people. But then Malon laughs, and Sheik holds his breath. It is a beautiful laugh, the way she throws back her head and shuts her eyes, gripping her side in anticipation of a cramp. What he would give to make her laugh in that way.

Halfway through their meal, Malon leaps from the bench and tugs at Sheik's shoulder. "Quick," she says, "before everyone's finished. I want to show you something."

He obliges, leaving the bowl he has barely touched, and follows her into the field. The sky is a shock of storm-laden blue, the clouds sloe-black and limned in sunshine. It begins to drizzle. Malon takes off her shoes and runs, beckoning him after her. "I've not felt rain so lovely since I was in nappies!" she calls, laughing, throwing open her arms and leaning back her head. Sheik shakes the rain from his scarf and watches her in wonder.

They cross the entire field until they reach a distant outbuilding, a tower that Sheik has never visited. Malon wrestles with the door. It is half rotted and gives beneath her hands. "Are you sure we should go in?" Sheik says. "The refugees don't come here."

"It's always been safe enough." Malon ducks inside. "I slept here most days 'til the day I left. It was my favorite place, when I was small. There's a grotto."

"We must take care," he says, with a lopsided smile, "not to get lost."

Malon chuckles. "I used to pretend I was the girl from that song, and that this tower was filled with fairies."

There are no fairies, only the brackish smell of dust and earth. Farm equipment rusts against the stone walls, and the floor overrun with crates, most cracked open like eggs, spilling stale straw. Malon leads him through the maze and crouches before a heap of broken slats, piled like tinder against the wall. She pulls it apart to reveal a hole.

"Come on." Malon wriggles through. "You'll fit, I swear — I can and I've got hips you haven't."

He follows. The hole is indeed wide enough, but the room beyond barely fits the two of them. Sheik touches the edge of it before he is all the way through.

"Light this," says Malon, handing him an oil lamp when he has dragged himself upright. He obliges. The flame leaps up, blue and subdued, casting the room in a glow like a Poe's lamp. The ceiling is too low for standing, and if he lies on his back, with his arms outstretched and his toes pointed, Sheik could reach both walls.

Malon takes off her cloak and spreads it out. Sheik adds his — setting aside his knives as he does, within reach — and then sit cross-legged, facing one another. "I don't know why this room is here," Malon says, low. "I like to think my ma and da had it put in special, knowing they'd have me one day."

"They built this ranch?"

"Inherited it. Or my da did. But they made it what it was. My da built the tower, and my ma brought the horses. She taught me a song that makes them come to me and be calm."

"Will you sing it to me?"

Malon ducks her head, hiding a grin. "Truly? You want to hear it?" He nods, and so she composes herself, eyes shut and back straight. But then she peeks under her eyelashes at him and starts to laugh.

"You look so serious," she says, "like I'm about to sing a dirge."

Sheik rearranges his expression, in an attempt to look less grim, but Malon only laughs harder and shakes her head. "Don't do that." She cups his cheek through the scarf. "It's what I love."

A thrill runs through him, but swiftly, he stifles the feeling. "I do not see why. There are better things."

She looks away from him, toward the far wall of the grotto. Sheik wishes he had not spoken. "Malon—" he begins.

She closes both hands around one of his.

"My da once told me you could sometimes be so happy, but the things you loved so frail, that you'd be afraid to smile in case you jinxed your luck and everything went to pieces. And I used to wonder about that, how it'd feel for someone to look at me like that, and you—" Her hand squeezes. "Sometimes that's how you look, when you talk to me, you look like _that_ , like you're holding yourself in so everything will stay together. And I — we're _strangers_ , you've no reason to look at me like that and yet you _do_ — you — and I — oh, gods. _Gods_. It's like being _worshipped_ and I'm not ashamed to say it. And by _you_ , of all people, who gave me back my ranch."

He rests his lips against the heel of her palm, but is suddenly afraid that despite all she has said, Malon will shy from the contact, the scuff of his scarf, the pressure of his mouth beneath it, the intimacy that has grown from words to touch in a heartbeat. But she does not draw away; he hears the soft, pleased intake of her breath.

"Let me feel your mouth," she breathes, "I want—"

Malon slips one hands from his and pulls down his scarf, ghosts her fingers across his lips. Her fingertips are calluses, her nails blunt and uneven, picked down to the red quick. He kisses them. Back and forth she plays her hand, as if his lips are a harp's strings, and with each pass Sheik's kisses grow less meticulous. He stills her stroking hands and kisses the back of it, hard and heavy, no courtly peck, but an act of reverence.

(He serves one lady — the princess and rightful heir to the throne of Hyrule — but he worships another.)

The rain picks up, a quiet drumming Sheik can now hear, the sort of rain Hyrule has nearly forgotten.

He draws her wrist up to his lips, feeling for the vein beneath her browned skin, but she lifts his face to hers with an impatient nudge. He meets her mouth, her darting tongue. There is so much of her to taste and slide and press against, more than he can possibly grasp. For all that he has looked at her and imagined her in his arms these past few weeks — these past few _months_ — he has not, _could not_ , imagine the fulness of her body, her kisses, the feverish grip of her hands.

She unravels his scarf, dipping in between each twist of the white cloth to kiss him, sloppily, catching his mouth as if by accident, panting when she breaks away. He unbraids her hair and runs his fingers up the nape of her neck, kneading her scalp. She rolls her head in his hands and groans. Her hair is as heavy as the scarf, as warm. He yanks her closer, wanting pressure, friction. She straddles his lap, hoisting up her skirt, and Sheik grips her backside, pulling her to him, pushing her skirt up to her stomach. She wears only an underkirtle, beneath.

His own garment is harder to push aside, close-fitting from the neck down. Malon starts laughing at him, after a few futile attempts. "Have you found yourself a suit of dragon's skin?" she teases. "I don't see how you managed to put this thing on."

But she makes little, pleased sounds, as they wrestle the garment down, revealing him, plants kisses on his chest and along his shoulders. Her hair, sweat-dark, sticks briefly as she draws herself up, then curves down to kiss his shoulder. Sheik combs through it, piling it in his hands like a scarlet crown, reaching deep to knead her scalp.

Malon’s fingers pause at the line of ink that starts just at Sheik’s shoulder blade. Her kisses pause.

He knows what she has found. He waits.

Malon runs her fingers to just below his shoulder blade, then draws back to look into his face. "May I see it? Your mark?"

Sheik rolls onto his knees and turns around. Malon traces the mark — the three triangles, the staring eye, the single red tears that drips to the curve of his lower back.

" _Oh_ ," she breathes again. "You mother _was_ a zealot."

"No." He peers at her over his shoulder, into her face suffused with blue lamplight. "If I had a mother, she did not put it there. It is Sheikah work."

"But the Sheikah are all _gone_."

He takes a shaky breath. "Most were lost. But not all. I…” He pauses. “I am one. I’m sorry I lied to you."

Her hand pauses at the edge of the teardrop. “We all have our secrets.”

“I… I don’t wish to have secrets. From you.”

She is silent for so long that Sheik fears she has changed her mind. Instead, she crawls around to face him; she sits so close that their knees brush. The blue light turns her hair the color of dusk. Her face is unsmiling, her eyes twilight dark. He takes her hand. She does not pull away.

“Then will you tell me why you work for the king?”

And there it is, once again — the chance to speak of his task, to show Malon that everything he says to her is true.

If his voice sticks in his throat, it is only from his habit of silence.

“Because someone must keep watch, and someone must know the enemy. Because the hero will need a friend when he finally wakes — someone to teach the songs, the spells. But—” Sheik swallows. “It has been seven years. And I don’t know if the hero _will_ ever awake.”

Malon draws closer and cups his face between her hands. “Let me watch with you,” she says.

This time, the words do not stick. “Yes. Yes.”

He leans in to kiss the sweat beading on her eyelids, her upper lip, until she begins to pant and urge him toward her mouth. Sheik tucks his hands behind her ears and pulls her flush against him. The metal broach of her shawl digs into his chest. It is a dull sort of pain, that sharpens when Malon shifts. She must feel it catch, because she wriggles a hand up between them to undo it. Sheik stops her. He does not mind the pain. He relishes it. It is one more part of Malon, of this moment, and he does not want to let it go.

“You’ll be hurt,” Malon says, and Sheik returns, “Then let me be hurt,” tightening his grip until he feels his skin could break. The pain in his chest sweetens the ache in his groin, as if this is what he has wanted: bruises and plenty of them.

But Malon is again impatient. She frees her hand and wrenches at the laces of her blouse, bares a shoulder, then a breast, and arcs up into Sheik’s mouth. “Kiss me here,” she gasps. He fills his mouth with her breast, and she groans, leaning over him, her hair covering him, dimming the blue firelight on the back of his eyelids.

The rain beats harder, ferocious, drowning out the grumble of still distant thunder. Sheik draws Malon down, so the rain will not overwhelm the sound of her panting cries. He relishes her voice as he relishes the pain of the broach and savors, now, the sight of her on top of him, her dress cast aside. She rides him, head thrown back, eyes squeezed shut, until release seizes her. She crests, tossing, shuddering — and sinks, at long last, down into his arms.

Sheik follows her more slowly, pulling out in the heartbeat before his body overtakes him. He holds her as he comes; she strokes his hair and steals kisses from his lips, and he knows, at last, that he is not alone.

oOo

They do not sleep, but lie together, listening to the rain, waiting for it to ebb.

It batters on, as if it means to continue deep into the night. At last, Malon sits up and reaches for her things. “It’s probably midday by now,” she says. “We should go, before it gets dark.”

They have no doubt been missed back at the castle. Sheik tries not to dwell on this. He will deal with the consequences when they come.

He is partway dressed when the tower door rattles, loud enough to be heard over the storm. Sheik and Malon freeze. The door thumps, once, twice, then crashes open. Sheik pulls up his garment, so fast his arms burn. He wraps his scarf around his face and resheathes his knives. Malon hunches over the lamp, hiding its flame.

Sheik makes a fist. The flame goes out.

“I know you’re in here.” Ingo’s voice, shrill and heaving. He sounds as if he has run a long way. Crates clatter as he shoves them aside, coughing and swearing. “The both of you. You’ve not gone, I know you’ve not gone, I saw your horse. Come and face what you’ve _done_.”

Sheik slips from the grotto. Ingo is turned away, surveying the room, head swiveling back and forth, swaying where he stands. He is shrunken, in the feeble light of outdoors, his heavy mustache plastered down, his suit of purple-and-gold cloth dripping onto the packed dirt. He grips his side and his breath rattles, wetly. Sheik coughs. Ingo wheels around.

“What have we done?” Sheik asks. Ingo is favoring one side; confused, Sheik peers down at the ranchmaster’s clenched hand, the clotted shadow between his fingers. The shadow glistens. Sheik inhales. He vaults over the crates, hand outstretched. “Are you _hurt_? What’s happened?”

Ingo shuffles back, waving Sheik away. His eyes are wide and wet. “You’ve done this,” he wheezes, “you and the girl, you’ve brought this on us.”

Sheik feels everything inside of him squeezing tight. He puts a hand on the hilt of the knife. “Brought what? What are you talking about, what happened to you? Who did that—”

“His Lordship never wanted the ranch changed, did he? He never wanted the peasants here. You _lied_ , you said he did, but he didn’t, did he? He never came round to check on things, like he did when he wanted the mare — only _you_ ever came, _you_.” The ranchmaster spits that final word, heaves for air. The hand clutched at his bloodied side spasms.

And that is when Sheik hears it, finally — the thin sound of people screaming beyond the rain.

“And now he’s come to strip me of my ranch,” Ingo sobs. “My ranch, and my title too.”

Sheik shoves past him. The rain is so fierce that he cannot at first see anything by the watered-down expanse of the field and fenced-off paddock, the loom out outbuildings. He strains, swiping water from his eyes. There is a dark, seething knot of people just past the main house, figures peeling off and running into the field, collapsing as other shadows pursue them and bring them down.

Sheik spins back around. Ingo is on his knees, retching. Malon stands just past him, the lamp clenched between her hands. She stares toward the house, the running people. “Please,” says Sheik, “don’t follow me, stay here.” But she does not stir, does not look at him, does not even blink.

Sheik runs.

He slides into the shadow of the outbuilding when he is close enough to make out the faces of the people collapsed in the mud, their limbs flung out, their backs and sides opened by spears. It is like the moblin raids on the farmers all over again.

It _is_ a raid. He sees the moblin party, twenty of them — no, thirty, more. Their spears dart — their hands grapple, flinging people down, into walls, among the kicked-over tables and benches. The coop has been overturned, cuccos trampled by iron-plated boots, the doors of the house and barn broken down, their windows smashed. Sheik hears the shriek of horses.

This is ground protected by the king. The ranch — it is meant to be under the protection of Ganondorf Dragmire _himself_.

He does not realize he is screaming this, until he catches the shaft of a spear between his blades. The jolt brings him back to himself. The moblin across from him grunts and hefts the spear free. Sheik steps into the moblin’s guard and bears down with his blade.

He makes his cuts with none of his wonted precision — the attack comes too fast, and there is so much rain, and this moblin is awake, upright, fighting back. But Sheik’s knives taste flesh, enough that the moblin staggers, and Sheik finishes what he has begun, hacking until the moblin lies still.

Butchery steadies him. Sheik wipes his hands, readjusts his grip in his knives. He is ready, this time, coldy aware. He is Sheikah. There is an art to the death he deals.

He moves through the turmoil as if it were a sea becalmed, cutting to maim so that he will not be too long slowed down. But as moblin after moblin drops, Sheik finds his stride. His art adjusts to the rain, mud, and wakeful quarry. Eventually, he cuts to kill.

He does not go unnoticed. A pair of moblins hound him — he uses the first to impale the second, then finishes them both off. But by this time, three more have spotted him, followed by a fourth, a fifth. Spears throng him; bodies press. He hears a moblin roaring, “The king’s man, we’ve found the king’s man!” His knives are not enough. His Sheikah art fails him.

Someone rips the scarf away. A spear lances his side; a punch cracks his jaw. One knife slithers away across the mud. Sheik is caught between two, three, four bodies, crushed against the boiled leather of their armor, carried to the ground. An iron heel smashes the hand that holds his other knife. There is blood in his mouth and nose. He clings to consciousness; it does not desert him. Iron shackle his wrists; a heavy rope loops about his neck. A moblin upon a horse holds the other end aloft.

“We ride!” he shouts. “Bring the corpses; the king will wish to see them.” Through swollen eyes, Sheik makes out his knives, taken from the mud and shoved through the belt at the moblin’s waist.

They ride, not bothering to stop for the night or even to cast spells against hunting poes and stalchildren. But no creature bothers them. Monsters know their own.

oOo

“So,” says Ganondorf Dragmire, “my moblin killer.”

He examines Sheik’s knives, turning them with an idle flourish of his hands, expression mild, almost academic, as if this moment has nothing in particular to do with him. Though Sheik quivers beneath the king’s unwavering golden gaze, he struggles to keep his eyes level. He has brought this on himself. He has brought this on the Lon Lon Ranch, the refugees, on _Malon_. There is no little thing he cannot do in penance.

“I do not doubt that peasants and bandits have learned to wield their blades efficiently,” Ganondorf says. “Theirs is a hard life, as you have seen fit to tell me. But. Even the most skilled peasant would be hard-pressed to kill in the manner my moblins were killed. There is an art, you see, to the cuts that were made. A pattern I recognized.”

He stares so long and steadily that at last, Sheik turns his head away in shame.

_“This is how we kill,” Impa had told him as a child, over and over, showing him the cuts to make and the places on the body to make them. “This is how we serve the Hylian king. This is our tradition. This is all we have left.”_

_And beside those campfires, where he had caught moblins sleeping in ones and twos, Sheik had carried on that tradition, then desecrated the bodies to hide what he had done. But it was not enough. A keen eye could tell._

“Do you know how many sisters I lost your tribe?” The king brandishes the knives again, voice bland. “How many cousins and aunts and friends?”

Despite the evidence before him, of stupidity and lessons unlearned, Sheik cannot surrender the habit of denial. “What tribe?” he slurs, through bloated lips.

Ganondorf’s face grows still. He steps down from the dais and behind Sheik, each step deliberate. Sheik flinches, then tries for self-possession: to straighten his shoulders, to meet punishment with his head raised. A blade sings across his back, shoulder to shoulder. He lurches. Ganondorf grabs a fistful of his garment and tears it away.

“ _This_ ,” he snarls, and Sheik feels the tip of a knife dig into the center of the tattoo, “this tribe of _scum_.”

Again, the knife sings, and opens up a line of fire across his back. Sheik chokes and slumps forward. He is already on his knees. He does not have far to fall.

“I suspect,” says Ganondorf, circling around, “that you have much to tell me about the vanished princess.”

Sheik struggles to right himself, wrestling for balance against the manacles and his burning, weeping back. His head is heavy, weighing down his neck like a ball and chain. He stares at the barbed poleyns that cover Ganondorf’s knees.

“But of course, you will not tell me, and I may have a better chance of finding her without you.” The king kneels. His voice is almost gentle. “You should be commended. Seven years is a very long time to wait for rescue.”

And so saying, he lifts Sheik’s blades and brings them down.

oOo

“Once,” says Impa, “we were shadow.”

She does not look at Sheik as she speaks; her eyes remain upon the princess kneeling before the tomb of the Royal Family. The grass is wet and silver with the early morning, but the princess has refused the rug Impa offered her upon their arrival. Perhaps she feels it a mark of disrespect to worry about the state of her white mourning dress in the presence of the dead. The dead, Sheik thinks, do not care either way.

But he is not here to offer opinions; he is here to keep watch. It is an easy enough duty — he stands with Impa some yards from the tomb, far enough back to afford the princess privacy, near enough that should a Poe rise from the wet earth, or an assassin from behind a gravestone, his blades and spells will find their marks. But the morning is quiet, the graveyard unoccupied. The encircling foothills, thickly wooded and still, shut in the silence. It is as if Kakariko Village does not exist, half a mile back; it is as if all of Hyrule has been reduced to this burying ground.

Sheik is young. Barely older than the Princess Zelda herself, and no less restless. His eyes drift from the princess’s bowed head to the tombstones, the woods, and finally, the fenced-off alcove just visible above the Royal Family’s tomb.

He is still staring at it when Impa first speaks, in a voice so low it carries no further than him. He flinches, mortified, and his eyes snap back to the princess. She still kneels, her back small and round, her body, in its thin, white dress, shivering. She had refused the cloak Sheik had offered her as well.

“You were looking at that fence.” Impa’s voice is too quiet for inflection. Sheik cannot tell if there is a rebuke in her words. “Tell me what lies beyond it.”

“The entrance to the Shadow Temple,” Sheik replies. He knows this as he knows the steel of his knives, the strings of his harp. He has read the books in Impa’s library, learned the tales.

Impa nods, once. “You will go there one day,” she says. “We were born from shadow, and when we die, we return to it.”

He looks at her full on, then, but she does not turn to meet his glance. “But the Sheikah do not come from there,” he says, trying to match the blankness of her tone and failing (for he is only a child; he does not yet know how to hide every part of himself, especially from his mentor). “That is a crypt.”

“I do not mean you will return to the Shadow Temple itself," Impa murmurs, "but to the thing that it symbolizes. Out of shadow and into shadow we return. That crypt is your birthright, boy.” She pauses. “Do not try to claim it too soon.”

He does not listen. He is young, and when Ganondorf Dragmire comes to power and drives the princess into hiding, he is alone. The years steal by, and he finds himself standing in the shadows of the alcove weeks after week, month after month. He uses the song-spell Impa taught him to get past the fence, and sits, for hours, among the unlit torches, staring up at the great eye carved into the door, a copy of the eye inked upon his back. One spell, he thinks, and he could light every torch; one spell, and the crypt will open. Shadow to shadow ( _of it, we are born; in it, we will die_ ). The bodies of Sheikah are buried in the temple walls; their blood is splattered across its stones. If he goes inside and does not come out, he will be one more dead servant of the Royal Family. It will be no loss.

He does not open the crypt — it is for the Hero to open, not him. (It is for a Hylian to claim his birthright, just as a Hylian claimed his services and his body before he was even born.) And when his third year of waiting become a fourth, and slides, inexorably, into a fifth, he stops visiting the temple altogether. For he comes to understand Impa's meaning, at last — it is not the temple itself that is his birthright so much as the shadows it was built to enshrine. The shadows follow him from that place, cold and empty and waiting.

He sees them, now, as the first blade opens him from throat to stomach, sees the shadows and the emptiness that have haunted him for seven years. He thought to find them among the moblins, but finds them, instead, on the flagstones of Ganondorf Dragmire’s castle, in the steel of his own Sheikah blades.

Shadow to shadow. _Of it, we are born_.

Except he is not _done_. The Hero did not awaken. The princess has not released him from her service. The ranch has been gutted. He has left Malon alone.

("Are there Sheikah there?" he asks, once, when he is still very young, peering into the shadows of Impa's house. There is only a single candle burning, and the room is thick with them. "If they go back into the shadows, are they here, then?" He stretches out one hand, fingers splayed, and pushes it into the shadows of a corner as if they are a physical thing. "Or here?"

"Perhaps," Impa says. "Perhaps they are.")

Shadow to shadow. _In it, we will die_.

oOo

When Ganondorf has finished his work, the moblins cluster round.

“What shall we do with him, my lord?” one asks, as the king turns to leave the room.

“Leave him in the Temple of Time.” Ganondorf pauses before the doors of the great hall. There is a stillness about him as if he is carefully holding himself in. “There must be something left for Zelda to find.”

oOo

On the second night after Malon leaves the Lon Lon Ranch, she sees a light in the Field.

It is not the first light she has seen. There have been the lamps of the king’s patrols, frightening her into the grass until them have passed, and there have been ghost lamps.

There are no moblins attached to this light, so she knows it is a ghost lamp. But of all the others, it comes nearest to her. It sways, as if from a tree limb, its bells softly tinkling. Malon makes a sign of protection and whispers a prayer to the goddesses, but the ghost lamp only swings and chimes.

It vanishes at first light. Malon does not see it disappear. She blinks, once, long and slow, and finds the lamp gone. She jerks her chin from her chest and gasps in the watery light of early morning, realizing, only later, that she has slept.

It is slow going across the Field, horseless and unprotected, with only the blade of a scythe for a weapon and nothing but the road and the endless grass before her. Malon looks for the junction in the road that will take her east to Kakariko and her da, if he still lives, but she finds only the stumps of mile signs.

She keeps to the path. No creatures come near, as Sheik once promises her, but she hears them in the shifting grass — hisses and screams, the chatter of bone. She hunches beneath her cloak, twisting the wooden shaft of the scythe until her palms blister. Slumbering upright, only to wake again, startled by formless dreams.

The ghost lamps follows her, coming no closer, moving no farther away. It circles her in a slow and deliberate way, appearing from the direction of Castle Town at dusk, moving clockwise. Malon stands on the first night and watches it, scythe lifted, her whole body shaking. She sinks with exhaustion near dawn, and slumbers for half the day. It is only upon the third night that she realizes the sounds of the monsters have grown distant when the light encircles her. She cannot even hear the leather beat of keese wings.

She puts down her scythe and waits for the lamp to begin its journey around her camp. And when it does, she sleeps.

When Malon at last reaches the junction in the path, she does not immediately take it, but waits for the lamp to appear. It does, farther away than usual, going toward the castle, a white spot on the darkness. Its tinkling bells are hushed, and long after it should have begun its journey, it does not move. She looks toward Kakariko, then away.

Her da will wait for her, she thinks, as he has waited all these seven long years. She needs to go to Epona, to Castle Town — to whatever the ghost wants her to see.

It is only a day’s journey to the castle after this. She comes upon the broken drawbridge at midday, and stares across it into the ruins of Castle Town. The sky, here, is still leaden; the gloom has not broken as it broke over the ranch. Malon leaps and scrambles over rotten wood, cracked stone. And when she has reached the other side, she sees the ghost lamp. It is not so bright, by daylight, but its brightness does not matter.

The ruins are heavy with silence. Malon picks her way through them, following the ghost lamp; it leads her away from the castle, in a direction she faintly remembers from when she was small, and her da would take her to the temple to pray. She thinks of the redeads, watching her from the mouths of dark alleys, but if they are there, they do not come near. There is only the ghost lamp, softly pealing before her.

The temple is largely unchanged — she remembers the immensity of it, the hush — but it is abandoned, no acolytes tending to the gardens, no pilgrims wandering through its doors. Colored glass glitters between the cobblestones. The ghost lamp pulses once, brighter than she has ever seen it, and surges up the grimy steps. Malon darts after it; her hands are suddenly clumsy on the rope of her rucksack.

There is a body at the top of the steps. Malon staggers to a halt, her mouth sour with fear. But still, the ghost lamp moves, past the body and toward the doors of the temple. It pauses, once — the bells jangle — and then it is through the doors and gone.

Malon does not follow. She sinks down beside the body. Its face is a ruin; it is naked to the waist. Unrecognizable, except for the great, red eye inked upon its back.

oOo

The ghost returns at dusk, and encircles her like a restless dog. Malon watches it through swollen eyes.

The cobblestones hurt when she first lies upon them. But soon enough, she does not feel them at all.

Eventually, the lamp stops its circling. It hovers. It waits, until she is ready to follow it inside.

oOo

She stands among the rubble of cracked pillars and broken beams, looking toward the dais and the three jewels upon an altar.

They are thick with dust, the emerald, ruby, and sapphire. Old, abandoned web wafts from their sheathes of gold. Restless and not knowing what else to do, Malon sets to cleaning them. There is an old Hylian lay — more a children’s song — about the jewels, and she hums it, low, beneath her breath. _Green for the forest, blue for the lake/Red for the mountain with death in its wake._

“I never sang Epona’s song for you, did I?” she says, into the stillness. “You want to hear it now?”

Her hands shake as she rubs the edge of her cloak across the face of the sapphire and waits for an answer. No answer comes. The ghost lamp is gone. She begins to hum again.

Deep in the shadows just beyond the dais, something shifts.

Malon’s heart clenches, so tightly that for a moment, she cannot speak. “Sheik?” she says, at last.

She knows so little about magic, only what she has hear in songs and stories, and once from the lips of a strange fairy boy dressed in green. It does not stop her from hoping, that perhaps the songs are right in their way.

The shadows go still. There is a beat of silence, two. Malon stands staring. The seconds turn to minutes.

And then there is a shape. She does not see it appear; it is simply there — slightly taller than she, arms at its sides. She steps down from the dais and pauses beneath a pillar with its base sheared away, so near the figure that if she but lifts her hand, she could touch it.

“Sheik?” she breathes.

The figure steps closer, toeing the light, and Malon makes out his face, his long, lean body. The shadows are kind — he has not been ravaged as the corpse that lies outside.

Her fingers tremble, to touch the face she cannot quite discern. “What have you become?”

He lifts his hands and cups her face between them. He does not touch her, but the air on her cheeks is like ice.

“Will you—?” The words are so brief, so soft, that she almost does not hear them. Sheik shudders, and his face twists, as if the utterance costs him, but he tries again, body bowed forward as if he is pushing the words out of himself. “Malon. Will you — watch with me?”

The songs are specific. Songs about magic, and ghosts, and the world that lies just below the skin of this one. Magic does not last. Ghosts do not linger. Follow the ghost lamp, and you will be lost.

“Yes,” she says. “As long as you need me to.”


End file.
